one question before switchover

Currently I've been running RedHat 7.3 in a VMWare machine on my WinXP
box. I love what I see in 7.3 and especially Gnome + Evolution. I am
just about ready to switch over completely to a pure Linux box. My
question is this:
Is the XWiindows + Gnome desktop faster/slower/about the same, as WinXP.
Running it in a virtual machine gives a good feel of it, but I don't
judge speed because that would be silly.
I also want to check a few games my wife plays to see if they'll work
with Wine. If not, I'll have to move them over to the Win2K box.
TIA,
Mark